Jacksonville Personal Injury Blog

A 92-year-old man went up against Big Tobacco and he won.

Last Thursday, a Broward County, Florida jury decided to award him more than $5.3 million at the conclusion of a Florida tobacco lawsuit trial in which he claimed cigarettes caused his wife’s death in 1996. The man sued Philip Morris for causing his wife’s lung cancer. His wife was 73 when she died. In an earlier phase of the trial, the jury agreed that cigarettes killed her.

Many people fail to understand the attitude toward cigarettes when the deceased woman started smoking at the age of 16 in 1923. Doctors advised people to smoke to calm their nerves. The government gave cigarettes out to soldiers. Television commercials promoted cigarette smoking as cool and sophisticated. Howard Engle, a Miami Beach pediatrician, who led the class action lawsuit representing some 700,000 smokers, had been a tobacco-addict since the 1940s when cigarette companies gave medical students at the University of Wisconsin free cigarettes. He hated Big Tobacco and its strategies used to create lifetime users by creating addicts.

Howard Engle died this past July at the age of 89. He had suffered from smoking–related respiratory disease and lymphoma. His lawsuit yielded him a little over $13,000, but he was excited to eventually see 42,558 Floridians split $575 million that was distributed to those in the class.

The Engle lawsuit established for the first time that the industry lied and deceived the public about the dangers of cigarettes. So while people today are fully informed before they begin smoking, years ago people were coaxed into an addiction, which takes more than will-power to quit.

The woman in the above story smoked two packs of cigarettes a day before she died and she couldn’t quit. One night when watching the ‘Seven Dwarfs,” the seven tobacco executives, swear to Congress in 1994 that cigarettes were not linked to cancer, she told her husband, “If anything happens to me, sue them.” It was tough to believe back then that professional executives would lie to the public. But it was true. By that time, the industry knew cigarettes caused lung cancer.

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Posted In: Health & Information , Personal Injury , Tobacco Lawsuits , Wrongful Death

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Big Tobacco has some close friends among the Florida legislature meeting in Tallahassee. According to an article from tampabay.com, Senate Bill 2198 caps the bond Big Tobacco would have to set aside in case they lose the cases filed by about 8,000 sick smokers. These are cigarette lawsuits filed by survivors of spouses who died from cigarettes, or by those injured permanently.

The bill will allow Big Tobacco a safe haven to appeal every judgment by posting bonds of no more than $100 million. A bond is required to be posted before an appeal can take place. And filing appeal after appeal can take time – all in Big Tobacco’s favor.

If a plaintiff dies, their survivor can take over a case, but if both die, the case goes away. Paving the way for endless appeals is a slap in the face to these people who have already waited decades to have their tobacco litigation day in court. Both a House and Senate committee have pushed through the bills.

This was very good news for Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, and Lorillard, which will be allowed to use the system against the injured.

Chalk this up to a corporate bailout for an industry that has been established by the Florida Supreme Court. Deceiving the public and knowingly manufacturing a product they knew was highly addictive, knowingly manufacturing a product they knew caused more than a dozen horrible diseases; and who intentionally marketed this very dangerous product to the youngest of Americans.

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Posted In: Personal Injury , Product Liability , Tobacco Lawsuits

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According to an online report, the first of thousands of Florida tobacco lawsuits to be filed against Philip Morris concluded Wednesday with a Fort Lauderdale jury awarding the widow of a smoker $8 million in damages.

It took the six jurors two days to return the favorable verdict to Elaine Hess.

Her husband, Stuart Hess, died in 1997 at the age of 55 of lung cancer after decades as a chain smoker. He was hopelessly addicted and unable to quit. Philip Morris said smoking was not addictive and Hess could have quit.

During the trial, jurors were shown video from the 1994 testimony of the “Seven Dwarfs” – the seven top executives of major tobacco companies who denied that smoking cigarettes was addictive.

This phase of the trial was to establish financial damages. $3 million was awarded in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages, sending a message to the Richmond, Virginia-based Philip Morris, a unit of Altria Group. The company announced it plans to appeal.

This case and the thousands of others, many represented by Farah and Farah, were forced to file individual cigarette lawsuits in Florida courts after a record $145 billion award in the Engle class-action was thrown out by the state Supreme Court in 2006.

While the outcome of this trial will not dictate what future individual juries could decide, Philip Morris has to be worried. It is already appealing a $79 million jury award in an Oregon case.

For years Big Tobacco enjoyed favorable rulings but this case at least agreed with the findings of the Engle class-action - that tobacco companies knew they were selling dangerous products and that they deceived the public by hiding those known risks.

Contact our Florida tobacco lawsuit attorneys at Farah and Farah today if you have any questions or feel you may have a potential claim. We’d be happy to talk to you about your case.

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Posted In: Tobacco Lawsuits

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